Soccer|Welcome to the World’s Smallest Soccer League. Both Teams Are Here.

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Welcome to the World’s Smallest Soccer League. Both Teams Are Here.

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The Garrison Gunners at halftime of a match in the Isles of Scilly Football League. Every Sunday, they play the only other team in the league: the Woolpack Wanderers.CreditCreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

By Rory Smith

Dec. 21, 2016

ST. MARY’S, Isles of Scilly — There is about an hour to go and much to do before kickoff when the players begin to arrive, bleary-eyed and heavy-legged, squinting in the cold sunlight.

The night before was a late night. Hugh Town, the village of a thousand souls that serves as the capital of St. Mary’s, the largest of the Isles of Scilly, is a bustling place in summer, its population swollen by the throngs of tourists who descend on this archipelago off the southwestern tip of England, 30 miles or so out into the Atlantic.

It dozes for much of the winter, but last night was a rare exception. It thrummed with activity: three Christmas parties, and the aftermath of a wedding breakfast. It was standing room only in the handful of pubs that stay open year-round. The karaoke, by all accounts, lasted until 3 a.m. This morning, the whole island seems to be feeling a little fragile.

The players, though, are not deterred by their hangovers. Sunday morning soccer here is part sport, part social ritual, part hair of the dog. Gingerly they settle into their ceremonial chores. One player sets off to mark out the field, another to place the corner flags. Two squadrons are dispatched to put up the nets, and another is sent off to the far side with a wheelbarrow and a spade, to fill in the rabbit holes.

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For some Garrison players, the night before a recent league match included karaoke until the wee hours.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

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The clubhouse at the Garrison soccer field, where the two teams alternate as home and away.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

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The players have their chores at each game: One marks out the field, another places the corner flags and at least one fills in the rabbit holes.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

The rest, the idlers and the stragglers, gather outside the changing rooms, cradling hand-rolled cigarettes and envying those who have brought bacon sandwiches. They anxiously count each arrival, wondering if this week will bring a full 11-a-side game.

Only when all of these vital tasks have been accomplished do they turn and head inside to put on their uniforms. Unthinking, half the players turn left, the rest right, as if on autopilot. Every second of this is familiar enough to cut through the fog of last night.

It is the same every week: the same field, the same changing rooms, the same teammates and the same opponents. The only difference, this morning, is the hangovers. The rest is just another typical day in the smallest soccer league in the world.

A League Becomes Smaller

There were, once, four teams in the Isles of Scilly Football League: two from St. Mary’s, and one each from the islands of Tresco and St. Martin’s. But a dwindling population has meant that since the 1950s, there have been only two. Initially they were called the Rangers and the Rovers, but the names were changed in the 1980s.

Since then, on the same patch of grass at Garrison Field, high on the hill that overlooks Hugh Town, the same two teams have played each other every week. No derby in world soccer is played quite as frequently as that between the Garrison Gunners and the Woolpack Wanderers.

Between October and May, the teams maintain a full league season of 20 games. There are two regular showpiece exhibitions: one against a veteran’s side, on Dec. 26, and one against a team made up of the bird watchers who visit the islands in the fall. Occasionally, a combined side will take on Dynamo Chough, a club based in Penzance, the nearest town on the mainland, for what is claimed to be the smallest trophy in world soccer. There is a Charity Shield to kick off the campaign, and two cup competitions, too. “And one of those,” said Anthony Gibbons, the league’s chairman, with a wry smile on his face, “is over two legs.”

Over the last decade or so, Gibbons and the cadre of stalwarts who sign up to play every season have grown used to the idea that their unique sporting microclimate sporadically commands attention from the outside.

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The Lyonesse Cup is awarded for games between a combined island team and a club based in Penzance on the mainland. A version of the trophy, believed to be the smallest in the world, is in the FIFA museum.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

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A photo of the 1948-49 St. Mary’s team. The Isles of Scilly Football League used to have four teams.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

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The players are mostly amateurs, and the captains pick the sides before each season to keep the league competitive.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

In 2008, Adidas filmed a series of promotional clips here, flying in the likes of David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Patrick Vieira and Michael Ballack to put the islands’ young players through their paces.

Many of the veterans of that week, shy teenagers then, have grown up to become the islands’ standout players. Jeremy Martin, a winger for the Wanderers, was filmed “allowing” Gerrard to sleep on his parents’ sofa — “It’s O.K., my friends stay over all the time,” he says in the footage — after the training sessions. Lee Eaton and Dan Ware, the Gunners’ central midfield partnership, remember the sight of household names appearing at Garrison Field, too. It was, both say, “bizarre.”

Since then, television crews have made the journey at regular intervals to catch up with their progress.

The previous week, the Italian broadcaster RAI sent a unit, and Gibbons has handled inquiries from Germany, Japan and Norway in recent months, too. Sky Sports has already filmed here, and the BBC wants to come in 2017.

The interest is welcomed, but it is tinged with a degree of bafflement. “We’re never quite sure if people are having a laugh at our expense,” Gibbons said.

The Scillies, certainly, has the feel of a place apart. Nobody here calls the country a little to the east England, or Britain: it is always “the mainland.” It is close — a 15-minute flight, depending on weather — but distant.

“It takes a certain sort of person to live here,” said Matt Simons, a left back with the Wanderers, and a clerk at the Steamship Company, one of the islands’ largest employers. “There are challenges, in winter especially.”

It is isolated. The flat-bottomed ferry, for hardy souls only, does not sail out of season, because the seas are too rough, and the prop planes that fly in from Land’s End, Exeter and Newquay are regularly grounded by fog. A couple of years ago, the weather was so bad for so long that medical supplies had to be airlifted in. Any complex health problems must be dealt with on the mainland, because the advanced facilities do not exist here.

It can be claustrophobic. The island has a small police force — two constables, supported by part-time community support officers — who are sent over from the nearest constabulary on the mainland, in Devon and Cornwall. They are allowed to serve for only five years. After that, they are deemed too “close” to the community to do their jobs effectively, and are replaced.

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Hugh Town serves as the capital of the island of St. Mary’s. Bustling with tourists in the summer, its population dwindles to about 1,000 in the winter.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

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The Scillies, off England’s southwest coast, are isolated. The ferry does not run out of season, and fog regularly grounds air traffic.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

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The Woolpack Battery was originally constructed to protect the Scillies from a French invasion, but the Germans later became a bigger threat.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

And it is a hard place, too. Many of the players have more than one job. Tom Spinner, another Wanderer, works alongside Simons at the Steamship Company and doubles as a firefighter simply to make ends meet.

“It’s improving, but Cornwall as a whole, and the Scillies in particular, were hit hard by the recession,” said Will Lethbridge, a D.J. at Radio Scilly and winger for the Wanderers.

At the same time, prices are high, driven up by the tourists in the summer and the cost of transportation year-round. Owning property is often entirely out of reach, thanks to the soaring numbers of second homes and severe restrictions on development. That, combined with the lack of further education — the local school stops at 16, and teenagers wishing to go to college have to leave their families to live on the mainland — has led to a constant population drain.

The Scillies’ fame is as a place of extraordinary beauty: pristine, golden beaches; clear, azure water; verdant green hills. It is a place of tremendous peace, too. “Leave your phone and wallet on the table at the pub,” Simons said. “They’ll be handed in within a few minutes.”

But it is not an easy place to live, and it is certainly not an easy place to run a football league. That is why the outsiders come, to see how the sport can survive even in such a harsh environment.

Choosing Up Sides

Every summer, a few weeks before the start of the season, that year’s captains of the Gunners and the Wanderers meet in a pub for one of the league’s most enduring traditions: the picking of the teams.

“It’s school rules, basically,” said Gibbons, each side choosing one player in turn until each has what is, in theory, a competitive squad. It does not always quite work out — this year, the Gunners are nine points clear in the league table — but Gibbons notes with some pride that in recent years, the league has regularly been up for grabs on the last day of the season.

“Doing it this way keeps it fresh, and even,” he said of the annual draft. “You couldn’t have one team that was much better than the other all of the time. People would lose interest.”

The method works. A few dozen express an interest in playing at the start of every season, parting with the 40 pound registration fee (about $50) that guarantees a place. Those numbers dwindle as the months wear on, as family and work commitments interfere, but there are normally enough — just — to get a game together.

“There’s always problems with people between 16 and 25,” Lethbridge said. “That’s the age when you’re most likely to play, but most people of that generation leave the islands.”

This summer, Gibbons had to put out an appeal on Radio Scilly for volunteers, and he searched during a six-a-side tournament held during the summer to see if any of the seasonal workers in the island’s hotels and restaurants would be interested. “Just anyone who could kick a ball, really,” was his selection criterion.

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Garrison’s captain, Anthony Gibbons, right, during a halftime sideline cigarette break.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

He knows, of course, that Sunday mornings at the Garrison are not always the most pleasant experience. Paul Charnock, one of two regular referees, remembers officiating in “hail, snow, torrential rain, thick fog, thunder and lightning.”

As a rule, he calls off games only when the playing surface is badly waterlogged. “There was one match we had to stop because someone twisted an ankle in a rabbit hole,” he said. Charnock used to referee in the National League, the fifth tier of the English game. “A rabbit hole was a first,” he said. “We just filled them in and then carried on.”

It takes more than a hole in the pitch to stop play. They will persist in all but the worst weather the Atlantic can throw at them. The fact that it is all, officially, unofficial does not dampen spirits, either. When one of Gibbons’s predecessors as chairman tried to apply for inclusion in Guinness World Records, he discovered that because both teams in the world’s smallest league are registered with England’s Football Association as part of the St. Mary’s Football Club — to keep costs down — their games are formally considered intramural affairs.

They make it work even though there is a constant struggle for numbers. The draft system means that there is no risk of boredom, no fear that it might all become too familiar.

They are there, every Sunday, same time, same place, same teams; not that anyone can ever really remember which side he is on. Not the name, anyway. That does not matter. They come for the ritual, for the game, just to play.

Hayden Simpson is watching, enjoying the sunshine and the chill, as his colleagues set up the field. “I play in red,” he said, when asked whether he is a Wanderer or a Gunner. “Which one is that?”